


& light is only now just breaking

by allthingsholy



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-22
Updated: 2011-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-14 23:33:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/154681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthingsholy/pseuds/allthingsholy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penny moves back home to take care of her mother. Sheldon, for reasons of his own, follows her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to betternovembers, ishie, and ericabo for the beta help. Written for the Big Bang Big Bang.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truck needs new brake pads, she decides, as she whines her way to a halt behind the stop sign. The steering wheel is cold beneath her fingers, even through the thin cotton of her gloves. She knows later it will be warm enough to set a thin sheen of sweat at her hairline, against the back of her neck, but in the dawn fog she can see the light mist of her breath.

The truck needs new brake pads, she decides, as she whines her way to a halt behind the stop sign. The steering wheel is cold beneath her fingers, even through the thin cotton of her gloves. She knows later it will be warm enough to set a thin sheen of sweat at her hairline, against the back of her neck, but in the dawn fog she can see the light mist of her breath. She winds the truck through the small town streets and parks it noisily behind the grocer’s, where she sees Jake leaning against the back door, lighting a cigarette. She smiles as she opens the truck’s door, leaning her head out first and calling out, “Is today the day?”

Jake smiles around the smoke in his mouth and blows it out slowly as she walks toward him, hands on her hips and blonde hair in her eyes. Despite his gruff, weathered face, Jake’s a soft, giving man, more likely to help you up than knock you down. “If I didn’t think Marge would hit me upside the head with a frying pan before I made it out the front door, you know I’d leave her for you in a heartbeat,” he answers. He takes another drag from his cigarette as he scratches his head, thick fingers soft against his steadily graying hair. He’s known Penny since before she could crawl, a fact he insists on reminding her of when she tries to haggle with him over percentages and profit shares and pricing.

Penny presses a hand to his chest as she reaches past him for the door handle, voice friendly and teasing as she says, “Jake, you’re breaking my heart. You can’t keep leading me on like this.” She winks at him as she pulls the door open, calling out behind her, “I’m going to get Doug and then you two are helping me unload.”

She thinks she hears Jake groan as the door swings shut behind her, and she stifles a yawn as she walks into the store. Doug has his back to her and she whistles to get his attention, a high sound that rings once around the room. He turns to look at her and grins as she motions back over her shoulder to the alley, starting to follow her before she even speaks. “It’s a light load today, don’t worry.”

“Everything okay?” Doug’s eyes are warm when he asks, pushing past her to hold the door open as she passes through.

She stops outside the door, sees Jake stamp out his cigarette and follow Doug to lower the tailgate. “Everything’s fine,” she says. It is not even almost true, but Doug’s smile is expectant and Jake’s brow is already wandering low toward worry. They have their own burdens and hardships, and she will not let them carry more for her than the cartons they are already lifting. “Let’s get these eggs down.”

She stays awhile after they unload, helps Doug stock a few shelves while they chat. Emma’s got a cold and Julie’s as big as a house, her due date fast approaching. Penny laughs as he tells her about all the latest cravings—dreamsicle ice cream and peanut butter, which she thinks sounds definitely more appetizing than the pickles and beef jerky of the month before. She slides loaves of bread onto the shelves and listens and laughs.

She leaves the grocer’s and heads for Ron’s, scrolling through the list of meds in her head. She wants a generic for the nausea medicine, since the co-pay went up, and she has a new prescription for the sleeping pills. Ten minutes later she walks out with bags in her hands, pills rattling at her sides. With one last stop at the diner for a cup of coffee and the local paper, Penny’s back on the road to home, the radio buzzing softly as she drives.

She pulls up to the house and turns off the car and sits. There is a stiffness in her fingers that has nothing to do with the cold air of morning, and she pulls off her gloves and runs her fingers through her hair, then grabs the steering wheel and tightens her hand. Every day starts like this, errands to run and work to be done and a low, aching feeling in her chest. She feels older already, in the six months she's been home, feels wizened beyond the telling of it. If asked, she will not say she misses California, but she's not so foolhardy as to know it isn't true. She lifts her face to the sun sliding just over the tree line and tries to feel the same warmth and wonder she felt on the coast, to feel fresh and whole and unburdened, but the feeling doesn’t come. Her face screws up, eyes shutting tight and tears coming faster, but she swallows her sob and sucks in a breath instead. She presses a cold hand to each cheek, and grabs the bags on the seat beside her, and opens the door and walks inside.

She does not make much noise as she sets about the house, as she busies herself in the kitchen, cracking the eggs her father’s set by the back door, toasting bread and making oatmeal and frying bacon. She is methodical in the whip of her hands around the skillet, her jaw a hard line as she sets plates on the table and spoons out food. She hears a creak from upstairs and stills. She waits a long, tense moment before deciding it’s just the house settling and not her mother waking up. She listens for the call of her name down the stairs, but it doesn’t come; instead she hears the trudge of her father’s boots up the back steps.

He’s sweaty and grease-stained when he walks in. There is nothing so rewarding as honest labor, he’s always said, and it’s this that Penny thinks about when she finds herself beneath an engine, or a cow. He doesn’t say anything as he drops down at the table beside her, head bowed low a second and hands clasped tight. Penny tightens her fingers around her fork, eyes on the bending slope of his neck, and moves her gaze resolutely to the clock above the stove. They eat in silence for a long minute before he asks, “Everything went all right at Jake’s?”

Penny chews a mouthful of toast, nodding her head. She swallows and answers, “Yeah, it was fine.” She pushes bits of eggs around her plate. “Julie’s due soon.”

Her father nod his head and bring his coffee cup to his lips. They are quiet again.

“Penny!” Her head darts up immediately and she moves to rise from her plate, but her father is quicker, faster on his feet, already halfway across the room and saying, “It’s all right, I’ll go.” She watches him cross the room, bound up the stairs as quick as he’ll go, and listens to the heavy fall of his footsteps on the floor above her head. She bites at her lip and then stands to clear the table.

There is a not so small part of Penny that always knew she’d end up back home, living in her father’s house. It is the part of her that postponed auditions and took longer shifts at the Cheesecake Factory and moved to Pasadena instead of LA. It is the part of her that was scared. She can still see her father’s face through the window as she stood in the driveway with her mother, boxes stuffed into the back of her already beaten-up car. Her mother brushed the hair away from Penny’s full, bright eyes and pressed her cheek to her daughter’s and said, “Be great, child. Be golden.” Penny saw the curtains swing closed as she wrapped her arms one last time around her mother.

Her arms are now half as full when she bundles her mother between them. Sarah is weakened, surely, but still strong. She trudges out every morning onto the back porch and sits wrapped in her loose, worn quilt. She watches Penny and her husband tend to the farm, the crops, the chickens, the cows. She waves them on with hands now weary but steady, and Penny finds herself looking toward the house, toward her mother and her porch swing, as much as she can throughout her morning.

In the afternoon Penny spends most of her day outside, or in the shed, or in the pasture. She keeps as much open air above her as possible, her face always turned toward the wide, wild stretch of sky above. She feeds the animals, tends them with the care and kindness of a woman grown strong from a girl who learned this young, how to heal and repair with her hands. She works the fields until the night starts to set in and dinner needs fixing. The house stays quiet, as far as she can tell, until she stamps up onto the back porch and wipes the mud from her boots. Her mother is always waiting just inside, curled into a chair or a corner of the couch, hands full of knitting needles and yarn. Penny chops vegetables while her mother simmers meat, and there is a comfortable hum in the small kitchen as they move together, reaching for this and that.

While their dinner cooks and they wait for Bob, Penny reads the gossip magazines aloud, the ones she spends too much of her paycheck buying. She reads the articles on Lindsay Lohan’s new hairstyle, and Kim Kardashian’s new boyfriend, and Angie and Brad’s latest fight. Her mother rolls her eyes and shakes her head, feet tucked up under her and sweater wrapped tight around her thin frame. Penny reads every bit of gossip, every word of useless, mind-numbing nonsense. She skips the human interest pieces, details of adversity and overcoming hardship. They’re reminded easily enough that life is hard, she figures, and there is no usefulness in belaboring the point.

The magazines only get them through Wednesday or so, and there are hours of silence left to fill while Bob finds his way in from the fields. She used to recite the bits of dialogue she could remember from her auditions, or stand in the center of the room and say every commercial tagline she could think of from every national ad she was never cast in. But lately she’s told stories of California, of her life there and her friends. Her mother has gotten attached to Raj and Sheldon, and these are the stories she tells most often now.

“And what about the other one, the roommate?” Sarah asks. So Penny tells her about Leonard, about his mother, about Stephanie and Leslie Winkle and MONTE. She tells her about Age of Conan and Penny Blossoms and teaching Sheldon how to drive. It’s the first time her mom’s laughed all day.

“And this one Christmas, I gave Sheldon a napkin signed by Leonard Nimoy—he was Spock in the original _Star Trek_ , he’s a big deal or something—and god, Sheldon actually hugged me.” For just a moment she feels Sheldon’s hands on her back, the trembling, uncertain wrap of his arms around her, but then her father is opening the back door and there is dinner to be served.

The days pass slowly, sliding into each other with nothing to mark the time. It’s all doctor’s appointments and chores, and the unnerving quiet in her house. At night, she puts on the tops she wore in Pasadena and does her hair up and heads into town. She tends bar at The Stumble Inn, passes pitchers and pints across the bar into warm, willing hands. She plays shrink and enabler, lover and sponsor and friend. She keeps her own problems to herself, and wields the bottles with steady hands.

More often than not, the bar is filled with the friends she had in high school, kids she’s known since she was young. They come in and congregate in the same corner every night, and she’s unsurprised to find most of them still in town. She knows leaving Nebraska isn’t for the faint of heart, and she gives them her best California smile when they step up to order.

She’s managed to rekindle friendships with some of them. Sally always files in on the nights she knows Penny’s working and seats herself along the bar to nurse Bud Lights until close. There is a familiarity in their chatter, Penny’s fingers sticky with soda and scotch as they clasp Sally’s atop the wood finish. More often than not, they reminisce. Penny’s reluctant to talk about the present, about her quiet house and ailing mother, so they tell stories about football games and high school dances, the warm glow of memory and alcohol between them.

“Or that time Jimmy Archer ran his truck into Burn Creek?” Penny leans heavily on her elbows as they rest atop the bar, her hands tucked under her chin. It’s early on Tuesday night and the crowd is thinned down to the regulars. Church volleyball league gets finished at 9, so the place will be empty until then, and Penny and Sally’s laughter is the loudest sound in the room right now.

“In all fairness,” Sally answers, “he did have Becky Thomms’ head in his lap.” Sally’s laugh is quick and brazen and Penny sees several people turn their heads toward her. “I hear he’s got an apartment in the city now, playing house with some girl from Lincoln. He’s a teacher, maybe?”

Penny shakes her head and pulls back from the bar. “There’s no hope for this country if Jimmy Archer is teaching America’s youth.”

Sally bows her head and runs a finger around the rim of her beer bottle. “I saw your dad in town the other day,” she says. Her voice is hushed, like she is hesitant to bring this up. “He didn’t look so good.”

Penny pulls back a little bit and wipes the bar down with a rag. Of all the aspects of her home life that currently trouble her, she’s least likely to talk about the strain between her father and herself, its history or its many causes. She doesn’t answer Sally immediately, just keeps rubbing away at the dark counter until it shines. “He’s fine. They’ve got Mom on some experimental trial and it’s just. Hard.” She meets Sally’s eyes and almost flinches at the look there, the unwanted, unwelcome pity. “But we’re really confident that this is going to work. Her doctor’s pretty optimistic, he thinks she’ll respond well. So. It’s fine.”

Sally dips her head and slides her hair behind her ear. When they were thirteen, Penny got dumped by Jake Reeser, got told she wasn’t fun enough, wasn’t _fast_ enough to keep him interested, and it was Sally who coiled back and slapped him right across his face. Penny’s always known how to mark loyalty, and she wishes she could find confidence enough to tell Sally the truth, how hard it’s been being home, how much she wishes she hadn’t come back. She knows it’s terrible and selfish, but she also thinks there’s a part of Sally that wouldn’t judge her, that would even understand. She wants to tell Sally a lot of things, but she keeps her mouth closed and pours them shots instead.

When she gets home from the bar, she calls Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment, but she hangs up when she hears Sheldon’s nasal greeting on the answering machine. She doesn’t call often, doesn’t know what to say, but there’s a hopeful kind of feeling in her chest, knowing that they are still there if she needs them. The decision to move back hadn’t been easy but the guys, for the most part, had been supportive. She’d been straightforward about it, acting much more calmly than she felt, striding into their apartment one Monday night and saying, “I’m moving back to Nebraska.”

There had been the shock and confusion she expected, but they all quieted down when she told them the situation. “My mom’s sick, and my sisters aren’t around to help, and my dad can’t take care of her by himself.” No nonsense, just facts. She knew she wouldn’t get through it if she hedged, or glossed over the particulars of it. Leonard had been the first to speak, to ask if she was okay, was there anything they could do, did she really have to go. She remembers the lump in her throat, the tight, terrible feeling in her chest as he looked at her with pity in his eyes. Her eyes sting even thinking about it now.

Leonard had been consoling, as expected, and Howard uncharacteristically solemn. Raj had briefly laid a hand on her shoulder, and given her a warm, resigned smile. Sheldon had resisted it, just like she knew he would, and hadn’t hardly helped her pack at all. “I find this an unacceptable change to my routine,” he said, hands tight at his sides. She didn’t resent his reaction; she even took comfort in it. His righteous indignation was often the only normal part of her day.

When it finally came time to go, she locked her apartment door one last time and walked across the hall to give Leonard her keys for the super.

“I’ll call when I get to Omaha,” she said, her arms tight around him. His hands ghosted across her back, but she didn’t hold on too long. She’d never been one for drawn-out displays of emotion, and she really didn’t want to cry again. She hugged Raj, and even Howard. When she came to stand in front of Sheldon, who refused to get out of his seat, he settled his hands on his knees and resolutely didn’t look at her.

“Sheldon, I have to go,” she said. “It’s time for me to leave.” Despite herself, her voice broke just a little, just enough to make him turn his head and meet her eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but then shook his head and settled his gaze somewhere over her left shoulder. She felt her heart beat faster, her breath come quicker, at the thought of never seeing them again, and her hands shook as she leaned down and wrapped her arms around his neck in an awkward, fumbling hug. “I’ll miss you, too,” she whispered, pulling away just as she felt his fingers come to rest against her elbow.

She calls the boys’ apartment once more, but this time listens to the recording on the machine all the way through to the end. When she finally falls asleep, the phone still pressed to her ear, she can almost feel Sheldon’s arms around her, and the warmth of his skin against hers.

This is how her days go, the first six months she is home. Errands in town, work around the house and in the fields. Trips into the city for doctors’ visits, and nights at the bar. Beth comes when she can, when she’s not working or shuttling the kids to ballet rehearsals and soccer games and study groups. Anne drives the hour and a half when she’s able, the distance from Lincoln being just far enough to be entirely inconvenient.

It’s not the life Penny wanted and certainly not the one she imagined, but she does her best for her mother. But the dim flicker of hope she keeps alive isn’t enough to fight the low, sad feelings that have taken up residence in her chest. She’s never worn self-pity well, but it follows her where she goes now, and try as she might, she cannot shake it.

It’s a dry night in April when Penny discovers rock bottom is still quite a long way down.

The phone rings just as Penny’s about to head upstairs for the night. Her father has settled himself in front of the TV, and mom’s already asleep in her room. When she answers, the receiver is cold in her hand, and there’s a pit in her stomach; she knows something is wrong.

The first thing Dr. Sherman does is apologize for calling so late, but it’s the last thing Penny really hears. He has results from the blood work they did earlier in the week, and his voice is somber as he gives her the news. There are strings of number, percentages and cell counts, and Penny stands with her hand on the railing, her jaw tightening even as her breath starts to fail.

She hangs up and swallows hard and it is as if she’s fallen from a height, as if a great, gaping chasm is closing in around her. The phone grows warm beneath her fingers, but still she cannot let go of the receiver. She hears the words again, slowly this time, and she feels them rattle around the room and settle and stay. Her father looks at her with drawn, worried eyes, and she cannot move her mouth to speak. She grits her teeth and clenches her hand, and still the words do not come. There are wide, aching hollows in her chest as she breathes, and when she finally settles the phone in its cradle again, she hears her father asking for news.

“What did Dr. Sherman say?” His voice is low, worn, like the brush of field rope against a pasture pole. It is the voice he uses when a horse has been downed, or a calf set to birth the wrong way forward. It does nothing to settle Penny’s nerves or slow her breathing, and she feels tears prick at her eyelids as she starts to speak. The numbers are worse, she says, and falling.

“The treatment was unsuccessful.” The words she uses are Dr. Sherman’s and there is nothing of Penny in them, no emotion besides numb, hopeless resignation.

Her father flattens his hands against the table, the lines of his shoulders stronger, defiant. “No,” he says, “that’s not right. She’s worked so hard.” He pushes himself back from the table and turns away, settling a hand on the rail of the chair. She hears him take in a rattling, watery breath, and it is this as much as anything that finally forces the tears down her cheeks. “This was supposed to work.”

Penny wishes she could go to him and have him wrap his arms around her and be the thing that holds her up, holds her together. She’s long known there’s not enough love in her father to pass around so freely, and lately she’s been grateful that he’s found reserves to show her mother, in the softness of his voice and the touch of his hand. She wishes there were room enough for her there, too, but she knows better than to expect so much from him. Her tears come faster as she hears him give in to his own, and there’s a white hot heat behind her eyes as she feels the knot in her throat suddenly give.

She is up the stairs and in her room in seconds, hands wildly digging beneath her bed for the shoebox of letters she’s written to Leonard and Sheldon in the months she’s been home. It had been an exercise in catharsis, once upon a time, a way to set her feelings outside herself and hope that they would stay there. Each envelope is addressed and stamped and waiting, full of words and feelings she couldn’t find an outlet for. The first few are all hollow greetings and false cheer. She knows if she opened them, read them, pieced them together, she could trace a line straight from the happy girl who left California to the girl she is today, with shaking hands and tear-stained cheeks, and chest so tight that she almost cannot breathe. She wrote the letters to get rid of her feelings, but here they are now, clutched in her hands. She wants to be rid of them, to send them to the sky, to the moon, to watch them leave her hands and be gone forever. She hurls herself down the stairs, out the door and into the cab of the truck. The engine turns over after three shaky rumbles, and gravel spits from beneath the tires as she takes the turns too quickly all the way into town.

She runs one stop sign, then another. These is no one on the street but her, no one else rushing madly forward with her heart planted firmly in her throat. When she pulls up beside the post office, the sidewalks are empty. She shoves the truck door open with her foot and crosses to the mailbox, her fingers tight around the fragile cardboard box.

She empties them all into the mailbox before she’s even gotten her bearings. The metal of the mailbox is cold beneath her hands as she leans against it, as she feels her heart beat a riot in her chest and the tears run heated down her cheeks. She stumbles back, her hands wiping at her face, and then crumbles onto the curb, elbows braced against her knees. She sits there for what feels like a lifetime, the wind in her hair, the town silent around her.

It’s a week later when Sheldon shows up.

\--

She’s got one hand buried elbow-deep in a bucket of grain when she hears the sound of tires on the gravel drive. She runs down the list of people it could be, eliminating them as quickly as she thinks of them: Beth has a school thing with Stacy today, Anne is working, and Tommy is—well, Tommy is Tommy. Mrs. Jennings from down the road, maybe, with a casserole, or Jake’s wife here to keep Sarah company for a few hours. There’s a usual trickle of people through their living room, come to help out or just sit a while. Her family’s lived in this town before either of her parents were born; Penny’s mother was the English teacher at the high school for almost thirty years. There’s no shortage of folk who want to keep Sarah Barnett company on a lazy April afternoon, but with planting season coming to a close, she can’t imagine who’d have the time today.

No sooner is Penny through the back door than she freezes, one hand on the jamb, the other tensed at her side. The voice from the living room hits her like a wall. Her heart starts to beat faster as she practically runs into the living room, and then there he is, sure enough: Sheldon Cooper being waved into a chair by her mother.

Penny doesn’t even bother trying to hide her surprise. She watches her mother watching Sheldon, the smile on her face and the expectant look on his. There are bags leaned up against the piano. “What are you doing here?”

She’s still in such a state of shock, and out of practice at translating Sheldon’s speech so quickly, that most of what he says flies by her. She does manage to grab the more salient details: he arrived in Omaha this morning and took a cab out to the farm. He’s on a leave from the University, reworking some details of his research, but she gets bogged down in the technical drivel he gets so excited about and only manages to grasp the last bit of what he’s saying.

“And the railway between Utah and Nebraska is really quite spectacular,” he says, drawing his monologue to a close.

Penny blinks her eyes a few times, and shakes her head. “Sheldon,” she says, taking a few steps closer, “I’m sure somewhere in there was what you thought was an explanation of what you’re doing here, but I must’ve missed it. So once again, please? For the little people?”

“I don’t follow.”

“What are you doing here?” There’s a tense edge in her voice, almost a warning.

“I told you,” he says, sitting straighter in his chair. “I’m on sabbatical.”

Penny smiles tightly at Sheldon and her mother, then excuses herself and steps out onto the porch. She does what she always does when she can’t quite figure Sheldon out: she asks Leonard.

He picks up on the first ring and his tone is immediately too nice, too sympathetic. “Penny, hello, how are you? Good? Okay? Things going well?”

She takes a deep breath and leans her shoulder against the porch rail, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Hello, Leonard. I’m fine. How are things with you?”

“Good.” His voice rattles through the receiver and Penny clenches her hand.

She decides not to hedge so she just clears her throat and starts in. “So Sheldon showed up at my house today.” She pauses, waiting for Leonard to answer. “My house in Nebraska,” she continues when he doesn’t make a sound.

He finds his voice eventually and explains as best he can, but even he doesn’t know the full story: the research Sheldon had been working on was blown out of the water by some guy in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, and the Department pulled his funding. From there it was an easy step to a fight with Gablehauser, and then half the Board. Sheldon had been characteristically reticent on the subject with Leonard, and yesterday, when Leonard had come home from the University, Sheldon had just been gone.

“I think they’d been looking to get rid of him for awhile. They’re calling it an involuntary leave of absence, which basically means he got fired,” Leonard concludes. Penny watches the cows as they meander back to the barn, and Leonard says, “You know how he can be. And with his research now back to square one, even his reputation isn’t enough incentive to keep out of his way and let him do his thing.”

Penny runs the toe of her boot over a notch in the wood at her feet. She thanks Leonard and catches up briefly on his life and news from Raj and Howard. By the time she ends the call, she’s in no more indulgent a mood than she was before, and feeling much more defensive toward Sheldon. She feels embarrassed to have him in her home like this, seeing her life lain out before him. There are pictures on the wall from when she was a little girl, gap-toothed and gawky. Her mother’s shoulders are hunched, her cheeks sagging and tired, and Penny’s suddenly vicious at being so exposed.

“Sheldon, can I talk to you upstairs?” Her voice is a hard line, and Sheldon inclines his head just slightly. He may be as socially perceptive as a doorknob, but he can still smell blood in the water when things get especially rough.

Sarah smiles and Penny is amazed at the genuine emotion in her eyes, the gratitude and welcoming. She says, “Penny, why don’t you show Sheldon to Beth’s room? He can get his things settled before dinner.” Penny’s hands are tight, her eyes narrowing. “How long do you think you’ll be staying, dear?”

Sheldon opens his mouth to speak, but Penny cuts him off. “Sheldon, why don’t we talk upstairs? I’ll show you where Beth’s room is.” Before he can answer, she shoulders past him and grabs one of his bags, casting him a look and heading quickly toward the steps. She hears him behind her, thanking her mother for having him, and then his footsteps are heavy behind hers as she walks to Beth’s room. She leans his bag against the wall and then grips the footboard of Beth’s bed between her hands. The wood is smooth and warm beneath her callused hands, and by the time Sheldon steps into the room, her knuckles are white.

“Sheldon,” she says slowly, “what are you doing here?” Her voice is pitched low and he has the good sense to look confused and wary.

“As I told you downstairs, several times, I’m on sabbatical.”

“That doesn’t explain what you’re doing at my parents’ house.” She looks away to Beth’s dresser, at the knick-knacks and photos littering the vanity. “Why did you come here?”

“Penny, do you not know what a sabbatical is?”

“I swear to God, I will beat you to death with your own luggage.”

Sheldon clenches his jaw and tightens his hands into fists. “Your letters came yesterday.”

Her face goes slack and she casts her eyes at the floor. She feels herself deflate, even as she knows that this isn’t the whole story. She knows there’s more to his appearance than a hefty stack of letters suddenly showing up at his front door, no matter how desperate the ramblings inside. If she’d sounded bad enough to warrant a thousand-mile trip across the country, it would be Leonard standing at the foot of her sister’s bed, not Sheldon. She remembers her conversation with Leonard and the last time that Sheldon found himself unemployed. She still has a poncho stuffed somewhere in the bottom of the boxes she’s not yet unpacked. She remembers his propensity to wander when lost.

He’s still looking at her with that hard, unforgiving expression he has, the same way he’d look through a telescope, or a magnifying glass. And she can’t quite bring herself to meet his eyes. “Leonard said you got fired,” she mumbles, shuffling to the head of the bed and dropping down onto the mattress.

She doesn’t need to be looking at Sheldon to feel the way he pulls up at the mere suggestion of failure, squaring his shoulders and puffing out his chest pathetically. “Intellectual differences,” he says, waving his hand dismissively as he walks toward her. He stands next to the bed, back straight as the bedposts. “I just need time to reorganize my research methodology and reconfigure some basic principles of my hypotheses, and I’m sure the Board members will realize the hastiness of their decision.”

Penny picks at the comforter beneath her. As much as she usually resents his attitude, she wishes sometimes for Sheldon’s surety, his confidence in his abilities and the strength of his convictions. She knows he can be a downright bastard but there’s a comfort in knowing he will never change enough to truly shock her. She’s had enough sudden shifts in her life these last few months to welcome any semblance of stability, no matter how odd or unexpected.

When she looks back up at Sheldon, it’s with an air of resignation. She glances at his bags, and his expectant expression. “How long were you planning on staying exactly?”

He casts his eyes around the room, at the trophies and figurines and stuffed animals that populate the shelves and desktop. He looks unsure of himself. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead, actually.”

Penny pulls her hands into her lap and worries her lip between her teeth. Now that the anger’s flattened out and the surprise given way somewhat, she’s almost glad to have Sheldon here. She never read the letters she wrote the boys after she finished them—that was part of her deal with herself—but she can only imagine what she must’ve said in the weeks since she got here, as her confidence and morale grew smaller and disappeared. She knows she said that she’s lonely, desperate and unsure. She knows she said that she missed them. When she meets his eyes, he’s still beside the bed, poised and sturdy against the bright pink of Beth’s walls, and entirely out of place. She sighs. “Dinner’s in an hour.” She lifts herself off the bed and heads back downstairs, outside to the barn and the wide open sky.

As welcoming as Sarah was, it would be a lie to say that things go smoothly. When her father first meets Sheldon, it’s with a twitch of his eye and a lift of his chin, and Penny knows he doesn’t exactly approve. They are two different men with two very different personalities, but even Penny knows that as much as they differ, they have more than a little in common. There is something to be said for taciturn men, and the giving and receiving of emotion, and when Penny looks around the table the first night Sheldon stays with them, there’s a twinge of recognition as she looks from her friend to her father.

When Sheldon’s been at the house a week, Bob corners her in the pole barn and sets his face in a hard line. “Your friend. How long is he planning to stay?”

There’s a part of Penny that is instantly defensive, and even though she’s unclear herself as to his general plans, she finds herself responding brusquely, “His name’s Sheldon, and as long as he wants. He needs a place to stay.”

“He has a place to stay. He lives in California.” Her father’s voice is low as he walks toward her. There’s grease on his arms where his sleeves are rolled up to the elbow. The combine must be acting up again.

Penny turns back to the coop and says, “He lost his job. He needed somewhere to go.”

“He’s not your boyfriend is he?”

“What? No.”

“He’s not here to drag you back to California behind him?”

Penny furrows her brow in confusion and look at her father for a long beat. “He’s not my boyfriend and he’s not here to take me back to California.”

“Penny—”

“He can help with Mom, okay?” Her hands still around the egg in her palm, and the shell is cool and hard against her skin. When she looks at her father, he’s framed by wide doors with the early morning sun at his back. He looks so young.

Her father swallows and runs his hand along the jamb. “Alright,” he says. “But for god’s sake, Pen, buy the boy some _jeans_.”

And she does. She takes him into town for jeans and sturdy boots. She gradually shows Sheldon the parts of her past he’s never seen. She takes him to Jake’s where he almost gets flattened for suggesting a new, more efficient layout for the store. They go into the diner where Penny had her first waitressing job and Penny orders them greasy hamburgers, or slices of homemade pie, or large plates of fries for them to share. They walk past Penny’s grade school, past the football field. Penny doesn’t show him the spot where she and Kurt always hid away after football games, but she does drag him into the stands and watch her perform all the parts of the half-time routine she can remember. They walk on and on, past the coffee shop and police station, and the newspaper office with its ancient machines out front.

They walk past the courthouse and city hall. Penny and Sheldon stop long enough to throw coins in the small fountain out front. She holds the quarter in her palm and makes a tight fist and wishes for strength. The coin hits the water with a satisfying thunk.

She sees Sheldon, eyes closed, face calm. He’s unusually solemn as he lobs his coin into the water. She’s oddly embarrassed to meet his eyes, instead studying the lines left on her palms from her tight fist. She traces the indents with the tip of one finger and falls into step beside Sheldon, repeating her wish one last time.

Sheldon is quiet beside her as they walk the streets. She doesn’t ask him what he wishes for.

One week passes and then another. She never asks Sheldon to stay, but she never tells him to leave. He never gives her a departure schedule or asks her for a ride to the airport, but never tells her he’s planning to stay. Instead, he makes himself useful in quiet, unassuming ways. In some ways, he’s different from the Sheldon she knew in California and in some ways he’s exactly the same.

This is the way they spend their days: While Penny is outside, cleaning stalls and ordering supplies, Sheldon sits with Sarah in their big, white farmhouse. She doesn’t know what they talk about exactly—she never feels quite comfortable asking—but her mother seems happy, and Sheldon unusually amiable.

After three quiet weeks on the farm, even Sheldon is restless, so Penny brings him to the bar with her one night while she’s working and sits him down in a stool next to Sally. “Alright, you two. Behave.”

She keeps an eye on them the rest of the night. Sally doesn’t look offended or horrified, so it seems like a success. Penny spends most of her time at the other end of the bar weaning tips away from middle-aged men having fights with their wives. When she finally manages to catch up with Sheldon and Sally, they’re in the middle of a heated debate.

“Bo and Hope have to get back together!” Sally shouts. Penny arches an eyebrow. This conversation can’t be about what she thinks it’s about.

Sheldon shakes his head like this is the most idiotic thought he’s ever heard; it’s a look Penny gets more times a day than she can count. “Hope is at best mentally unstable and in all likelihood, actually deranged. Carly, though she has her flaws, seems much more sound of mind. Bo is clearly making the most logical choice in staying with Carly.”

Penny holds up both hands, saying, “Hang on. Are you two talking about a soap opera?”

Sheldon crosses his arms defensively in front of his chest. “Your mother makes me watch _Days of Our Lives_.”

It’s an unusual friendship, but it seems to blossom despite the odds and overwhelming chance of disaster. Sheldon accompanies Penny to the bar more often than not and spends his nights downing Diet Not-So-Virgin Cuba Libres and verbally sparring with Sally. She’s a worthy adversary, giving him as good as she gets, which is probably why he keeps coming back.

After awhile, Sheldon starts helping out in the barns and the pastures. He grew up in a rural area even though he’s loathe to admit it, and despite his initial protests, he takes to the work quickly. Though Penny doesn’t say it, his presence helps. His complaints keep her mind off her problems, his company keeps her out of her own head. She doesn’t tell him, but she’s glad to have him around.

She takes him around the pole barn, points out the equipment and various supplies. She takes him on a tour of the land, the cab of the truck mostly quiet as they bounce and roll down the dried out lanes that snake across the fields. After the first month, she teaches him to drive on the winding, forgotten roads that crisscross the farm. His grip is impossibly tight on the steering wheel and his movements against the pedal are jerky, all starts and stops. She makes him try again and again, until they’re inching along at a slow but steady crawl. Every bump makes him tense up and mutter under his breath, 4-letter words she recognizes and longer ones she’s pretty sure are Klingon. She picks at the stressed leather under her thigh, leans her head against the window, and watches the fields pass by.

It gets to be a ritual; every night after dinner they take the oldest Ford and drive west into the sunset. Sheldon complains at first but eventually he starts to like it as he works his way up to third gear. They roll the windows down and let warm May air fill the cab, the silence more comfortable than any noise that fills her house. They don’t talk about cancer or chemo or quietly wasting parents on the nights she convinces him to pull off the dirt road and lower the tailgate. He climbs reluctantly into the truck bed, his feet dangling toward the ground as he sits with his hands gently folded in his lap. She presses her knee to his and it is quiet and peaceful and calm. Penny feels happier than she has in a long, long time.

He’s rambling on about the Pleiades, seven sisters in the sky, and her eyes fall shut as the wind pushes her hair around her shoulders. Sheldon’s voice is slow and sure as he talks about lunar cycles and gravitational pulls. He points out star systems and galaxies, the reach of his arm strong and steady above her head. Out past the fields, the coyotes howl and they sit, both waiting, the gentle rise and fall of Sheldon beside her an untold comfort. She’s come to depend on him, despite herself. She wonders sometimes that he is still here, helping her the way he does, but she’s formulating her own theories as to his decisions not to head back to the coast. For one thing, her mother is as doting and gentle as every woman from his childhood, hell-bent on mothering and pampering him as if he’s not a grown man. Which isn’t to say that he hasn’t taken to the manual labor her life requires either. More surprising than anything is the way he’s resigned himself to helping out with the daily tasks she sets herself. And though she won’t admit it, she’s come to appreciate the way he looks now.

She’s come to terms with the fact that home is lonely, and that there aren’t many ways to meet people, or people to meet who don’t drive her crazy, but it’s still surprising when she finds herself watching Sheldon walk to the barn or the pasture and really _appreciating_ the way he looks in his jeans. At the bar one night Sally makes a comment when Sheldon’s in the bathroom, leaning over the counter and whispering, “The boy sure wears cowboy surprisingly well.” After that, Penny finds herself watching him in what she tells herself is an objective, scientific kind of way. The muscles in his arms are threaded and strong. His hair is getting long, starting to curl just slightly at the ends, and it makes his neck look strong and lean, the skin of his throat turned tan. She doesn’t miss the irony in the fact that Sheldon had to move from California to Nebraska to finally get a tan.

It’s the mundane tasks he does that most hold her interest. He’s taken over as sous-chef for her mother every night before dinner and for whatever reason, she can’t take her eyes off him. It’s peaceful, the precision and focus he has.

He’s slicing carrots one night when she comes in from the barn, and she watches the steady rise and fall of his knife as she washes her hands. She can see her mother in the living room, knitting needles moving steadily in her hands, a little slower than they used to.

“When I was little, I had more sweaters than I knew what to do with,” Penny says. “I had one in every color. I could’ve worn a different one every day for a month and never run out.” When she turns to Sheldon, his knife is still on the cutting board and his face is tilted toward her. If Penny didn’t know better, she’d swear he was interested in what she was saying. She holds his gaze and narrows her eyes, confused, and Sheldon finally shakes it off and grabs an onion from the counter.

They chat a bit while he chops, and she watches his hands as he sautés the vegetables and then adds them to the pot. She listens to him babble on about an article he was reading in the Physics Quarterly while she shuffles and re-shuffles the deck of cards on the counter. When the weather’s foul or the workload light, Penny comes in early from the fields and the three of them play, gin rummy and hearts and sometimes poker. She knows that Sheldon counts cards, but she also knows that he lets her mother cheat. The first time she saw him notice and not say anything, she let him talk to her about quarks for half an hour.

She starts a game of solitaire, all the cards in her hand just like her grandma taught her, and asks, “Sheldon, do you ever miss Texas?”

He adds spices to the stock pot and doesn’t answer right away. He measures out teaspoons with intense precision. Penny pulls four cards from the deck, all queens. “I occasionally miss my family, but geographically no, I do not miss Texas. It’s far too humid.”

“But growing up there, I mean. Did you like it?”

“No.” He turns back to the pot and stirs in perfect circle, one rotation every two seconds. It’s a system he’s devised, and it’s by turns hilarious and endearing. She watches him stir and tidy up and put the spice jars back on the rack—he’d alphabetized it as soon as he’d taken up kitchen duty—while she finishes her game.

“This place can’t be all that different from Texas,” she says, picking at the pages of a folder on the counter. “Do you like it here?” She turns her head up and finds Sheldon inches away from her. His eyes dart quickly from her face to the folder and when he reaches for it, she barely manages to pull it away in time. She clasps the folder in her hand and backs away from him and he stands tensed, one hand on the counter, his expression drawn.

“Penny,” he says, “that’s mine.”

Penny holds it tauntingly in front of her face. “You’ve been using my towels and shampoo for a month. You get no secrets.” Sheldon makes a last desperate swipe for the folder, but Penny backs out toward the door and opens it, her eyes scanning the pages inside.

It’s miles of scientific jargon, and Penny almost snaps it shut and throws it back to him, but then she sees words she recognizes. Carcinoma, malignant, tumor, treatment. It’s a study on the treatment of her mother’s cancer, the report from an experiment they did out east. She holds the pages tightly between her fingers, no longer reading. Sheldon turns back to the stove, and his hands move slowly as he stirs the gravy into the pot.

Penny keeps still for a minute, or an hour. She watches Sheldon’s hands, and the tension in his back, and the determined way he will not meet her eyes. She doesn’t say anything when she walks up behind him and sets the folder back down, just presses her hand between his shoulder blades and then heads upstairs to change.

That night she realizes, with a sense of startling clarity, how little fight there’s been in her the past few weeks. How ever since the night Dr. Sherman called with the negative results from the last trial doses, they’ve all just been waiting, resigned. How little spark has been in her to push herself, her mother, her whole family to keep going.

It’s not often that Penny thinks of it, but really, this farm is her mother’s. It’s something Penny’s always liked to remind herself of on hard days: she thinks of patient, steadfast women with strong hands and stronger wills, and it’s an image she uses to prop herself up on the most trying of days.

She won’t say it, but it doesn’t stop her from thinking it now: really, they’re all hard days. There are calluses on her hands, the pads of her fingers grown used to honest labor and rough work. She runs the harsh skin of her palms over the smooth expanse of her abdomen, rests her hands atop her chest and remembers her grandmother, imagines the generations before her who wrought their livelihood from barren fields and learned to make life thrive where none was made to grow. Her hands are heavy on her chest and she thinks long into the night, her thoughts expanding out and on forever.

The next day, Penny heads into town and gets a library card and stalks resolutely through the stacks: she passes the romance novels with their ridiculous Harlequin covers, walks straight past the detective novels and murder mysteries. She comes to a stop in front of the biographies and finds her hands reaching for stories of strong, unbending women and the places they took up in history. She checks out a book on Elizabeth I, another on Catherine the Great. On her way to the counter, she stops to grab something thick and heavy from the sci-fi section, the better to keep Sheldon occupied.

She reads Sarah the books she brings home, or listens while Sheldon reads them instead, and every week she goes back for new ones. The next week when they go for an appointment with Dr. Sherman, she gives him the information Sheldon found about the trial out east. It looks promising, he tells her.

When they get back from the city, Penny wraps her arms around Sheldon and squeezes until he yelps.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first time Sheldon meets Beth and Anne and the extended family all together, she quizzes him for an hour the night before, on names and occupations and—most importantly—the crucial subjects that are to be avoided at all costs.

The first time Sheldon meets Beth and Anne and the extended family all together, she quizzes him for an hour the night before, on names and occupations and—most importantly—the crucial subjects that are to be avoided at all costs. No bringing up how suspicious and sketchy Anne’s boyfriend seems or how tired she always looks; no getting into the middle of a fight between Beth and John: they don’t need Sheldon’s opinion, and they really don’t want it.

“And what is the number one thing you’re not supposed to talk about?” she asks as she hears the crunch of gravel from a car pulling into the driveway.

Sheldon straightens the shirt Penny forced on him, tugging the collar all out of shape again. “No bringing up your brother,” he says, dodging Penny’s hands as they reach for his neck. “And if someone mentions the name Tommy, I suddenly have urgent business in the kitchen.” He only knows the basics, what he’s managed to cobble together from the bits of Tommy that manage to leak through: that he’s Penny’s older brother; that he’s not around; that he’s not welcome; that he calls once a week to talk to their mom, long conversations none of them are privy to and all of them wonder about.

Penny tucks her hair behind her ears and squints at Sheldon, her expression equal parts accepting and resigned. He stills looks more than a little awkward and out of place standing in her parents’ living room, but at least there aren’t aliens or superheroes drawn across his chest. She sees her dad holding the door open and Beth steps inside, and Penny nudges past Sheldon with a reassuring smile and heads over to hug her sister.

For the most part, Sheldon behaves himself. Penny keeps an eye on him as she hugs and teases the twins and marvels at how much bigger they seem to get every time she sees them.

Anne looks the same: tired and overworked. She hovers around Sarah while Penny keeps Matt occupied with talk of the Husker’s prospects for the fall: Coach Pellini is bringing up a stellar recruiting class, he tells her, and their ground game is sure to take them to a Bowl this year. Penny nods and out of the corner of her eye watches Sheldon and Jeremy talking animatedly in the corner. She’s taken aback for a moment at what her 13-year-old nephew could possibly be saying to keep Sheldon interested, but then she remembers: the comics. Sheldon had helped her pick out more than a few presents for her nephew, and she smiles, imagining the trouble Jeremy is bound to be in if he insults the wrong superhero.

Overall, the night goes smoothly. The food doesn’t end up burnt, and no one gets shot in the ass, so it seems like success. Every once in awhile, Beth catches Penny’s gaze and looks questioningly at Sheldon, but Penny just rolls her eyes and shrugs it off and goes back to her potato salad.

The conversation eventually turns to old stories of the past, as it so often seems to lately. Penny tries to find it charming instead of morbid, but it’s usually light-hearted enough. There are lots of stories to tell and most of them are old enough to be funny now: broken bones and near misses, hefty punishments for acts of teenaged rebellion and stupidity.

“I don’t regret it,” Beth says, shaking her head, her dark hair brushing against her cheeks. “I made it to that concert, damn it, even if I did show up covered in mud from the thighs down.”

They’re all roaring harder than is necessary, just glad to feel good and happy and alive. Under the sound of laughter, Sheldon whispers, “Who is this Cougar and why on Earth would you climb out your bedroom window to go see him?”

Penny leans over and knocks his shoulder with her own. “I’ll explain later,” she says to him, and then says to Beth, “In all fairness, this is a small town. There’s nothing to do besides find trouble. And if you can’t find any, you can always make your own.”

“Some of you were better at that than others.” It’s an off-hand comment from her father, said almost under his breath, and Penny has no doubt it was aimed at her. Her whole face goes slack and then her defenses raise up.

“No one was quite as good as Tommy though.” Penny’s voice is sharp and Sheldon goes tense beside her. She lays a hand on his arm to keep him in his seat and continues, “Tommy always had a special gift for trouble, don’t you think, Dad?”

He’s working the muscle in his jaw and Penny can feel the whole table around her buzzing, even though no one says a word. They’re stuck in a stalemate for what seems like forever when Sarah interrupts, saying, “I have an announcement,” she says. She runs her fingers over the table cloth, traces the pattern beneath her hand. It’s an heirloom or something, Penny’s pretty sure, something handed down from generation to generation, from mother to daughter. Penny finds herself wondering suddenly what pieces she’ll get, when the time comes, and the thought immediately pulls her up short. She tunes back in just in time to hear Sarah finish, “I’m not going to take the treatment.”

Penny feels her back go rigid, and her breath catches hard in her chest. She looks at her plate and doesn’t see anything, and doesn’t hear anything Beth says when her sister finally comes to and starts to argue. She keeps her head down, hands balled into fists on the table top. All Penny can think of are the stories she’s read her mother, of determined, steadfast women and the trials they lived through, of the strength of generations she’s so long relied upon.

When she finally does look up, the first eyes on her are her father’s. He’s got one hand flat against the table and the other locked around Sarah’s, and Penny knows that he knew this was coming, knew her mother had decided this and hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t told her. Hadn’t consulted her. She’s furious at the both of them, and her jaw aches from clenching it.

Sarah’s smile is brittle as she looks at each of her daughters in turn, and when she finally turns to Penny, she can’t meet her eyes.

Penny stands up, the backs of her knees roughly shoving her chair away from the table. “I can’t believe you didn’t talk to me about this first,” she says, hands pressed futilely into the tabletop. “I’m here, every day,” she says. She feels more than hears her voice crack, and with one last look at her mother, she pushes away from the table and heads outside, the door slamming loudly behind her.

She doesn’t think much about what she’s doing. She slides into the front seat of her dad’s car and heads into town, driving too fast. She doesn’t cry. Her blood’s set to boil in her veins and there’s a hard knot in her throat, where the sadness should be. Instead, all she is is angry. The whole way into town, all she thinks about is the last drive she took like this, with a box of letters in the front seat and her whole world crashing down around her. She finds her way onto Main Street, but she drives right past the post office in favor of the bar where she works. Jason’s behind the counter, rubbing the rag over the already clean wood, and she falls onto the stool with a loud, angry noise. Her chest is still heaving. Her tears still won’t come.

“Double shot of whisky,” she says. Her voice sounds strange, like she’s a very little girl, or a very old woman. She doesn’t feel like herself, and when she sees her reflection in the mirror behind the bar, her eyes are wild and her face is twisted and ugly. Jason sets the shot down in front of her, and when she throws it back, she doesn’t flinch.

She’s not sure how long she stays, and she doesn’t know how much she has to drink. Eventually, Sally comes and tries to match her drink for drink for awhile, but then she just drags Penny out onto the curb, and forces her to drink way too many glasses of water. The night is muggy and still, and there are tears streaming down Penny’s face before she even realizes she’s finally started to cry.

She’s tired, and upset, and really drunk, and if she had to name just one emotion that’s raking through her as she sits with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, it would be helplessness. She knew coming out here would be tough, that there was always the possibility that her mom might not get better and things would go this way, but Penny can’t stand how powerless she feels. Her whole world is spinning around her, and she can’t do a thing to stop it.

Sally sits with Penny until she’s all cried out, and her eyes are hot and sore, but finally dry. Her heaving chest finally slows and stills, until her breathing is shallow and raspy, and she’s almost completely quiet. Her head is throbbing and there’s still an ache inside, a wide, gaping hole behind her ribcage, but she tries not to think about it. She tries to stay focused on the feel of Sally beside her, on the feel of her hand rubbing slow, soothing circles onto Penny’s back.

They’re sitting like that, rocking back and forth, when Penny hears another car pull up to the curb. When she raises her head, wobbly on her neck like a newborn, she sees Sheldon climbing out of the cab of her father’s truck. He’s still got on the shirt she made him wear, but there are more buttons undone and some bright color is poking through at his collar. Penny squints her eyes to try to clear up her blurred vision, but her head feels heavy and unsteady on her shoulders, and she drops her forehead onto her arms instead.

She hears Sally thank Sheldon for coming, and hears Sheldon thank Sally for calling him, and if she weren’t drunk she’d be able to name the tone of voice he’s using right now.

“You sound like you’re worried, but that can’t be right,” she mumbles into her arms.

Sally bends down in front of her and lifts Penny’s head between her hands. “Penny, you need to get in the truck, so Sheldon can take you home.”

“I don’t want to go home,” she says. She knows she’s being whiney and difficult. She doesn’t really care. It’s her turn to be taken care of, she decides stubbornly, and let the rest of them deal with it for a change.

“Penny,” Sally says again, “please get in the truck.”

Penny feels like her whole body weighs a thousand pounds, like she couldn’t stand up if she tried. She opens her mouth to tell them that when she feels hands close around her elbows, and someone lifting her onto her feet.

Surprisingly enough, when she looks up, it’s Sheldon’s chest she’s pressing her cheek against. He looks down at her disdainfully and says, “I am not a cab service, and I am not a nurse. Please refrain from vomiting until I’ve deposited you at your house. In your bathroom. Away from me.”

She frowns at him, but still manages to put one foot in front of the other as he guides her back to the truck. When she’s securely deposited in the cab, she clumsily rolls down the window and yells to Sally, “Boot and rally, baby! Boot and rally!”

Sally spins on the sidewalk, her voice loud and ringing. “And if you boot all over your dad’s truck, that’s just one more mess he has to clean up!” Penny smiles at that, and leans her head back against the seat and waits for Sheldon to start the car.

Even drunk and half-asleep, Penny can tell that Sheldon’s driving way below the speed limit the whole way home. The window’s rolled all the way down, and Penny’s head is lolling back against the seat, the warm air blowing her hair around her face. Her eyes are closed, so she can’t actually see the fields they’re passing as they wind their way back to the house, but she doesn’t need to see them to know what’s there: the same fields that have always been there, being farmed by the same people who’ve always farmed them, who’ll live out their whole lives in a hundred-mile radius. She’s drunk and melancholy and feeling sorry for herself, and she’s embarrassed to be back in this town with these people, that her great escape just led her right back here.

When they finally pull up to the house, Sheldon turns off the engine and goes to open his door, but she stops him with a hand on his arm. “Just sit for a minute,” she says. The windows are down and the night is warm, and the crickets are chirping in the fields. Her tears start again, quietly, and Sheldon sits with her until she’s finally quiet.

\--

When Penny wakes the next morning, her head is throbbing and her face is puffy. She barely opens her eyes long enough to flinch away from the sun streaming in through her window, and then goes back to sleep. She spends most of the day like this, drifting in and out of consciousness. She has strange dreams and wakes drenched in sweat, or freezing cold. In one, she’s an archaeologist on a dig, and she keeps shoveling handfuls of sand from a hole in the ground. She knows somehow that there is treasure there, but her hands keep coming up empty, with nothing with the fine grains that slide through her fingers.

When she wakes, she feels gritty and hot. She keeps very still until the room stops spinning, and then trudges off to the shower. She takes deep, calming breaths as she feels the grime wash away from her hair and face, and after she’s rinsed and clean, she turns the water up so hot she can hardly stand it and braces her hands against the shower wall. She lets the spray beat down on her back, rivulets running down her chest and abdomen, down her thighs and calves. Her skin stings and reddens, and she lowers herself onto the shower floor and wraps her arms around her shins and sits. She cries but she does not wail. Her breathing is labored because of the heavy steam, but she doesn’t weep.

When the water eventually starts to cool, Penny reaches up and turns off the shower. She wrings out her hair, and towels herself off. The mirror is fogged up and Penny can’t see her reflection, but she remembers the look on her face in the glass last night, and has no desire to see herself like that again. She knows that she’s heartbroken. She doesn’t need to see it.

By the time she gets back to her room, wrapped snugly in a towel, the last streaks of sunset are just visible over the treetops. Penny watches the light slide between the branches, the pinks and pale hues doing little to lighten her mood. Just past the fence is the spot where her dad set them up a tree fort, where they’d spend hours playing or lounging or sulking. Penny wonders if there’s still a pack of Tommy’s smokes under the loose floor board, or whether Anne’s magazines are still in a pile in the corner.

Penny pulls on shorts and a t-shirt and creeps down the stairs, slipping quietly to the back door. The light in the living room is blue and muted from the TV, and she can hear her mother and father, and the quiet hush of their voices. She stops to listen for just a moment and fights down the surge of feeling in her gut as she turns away.

Penny pulls the door shut softly behind her as she steps out onto the porch, and she’s down the stairs and into the yard before she hears Sheldon’s voice from the porch.

“Where are you going?”

When she turns toward him, she sees him sitting in the porch swing, rocking the seat back and forth. The grass beneath her bare feet, is cool and green and she pokes at a dandelion with her toe. “We had this place when we were kids, I just wanted to—” Her voice trails off and she looks up at Sheldon. The night’s getting dark too quickly and she can barely make out his features, but she can see well enough to know he’s looking right at her. She shrugs and says, “You coming?”

She sees him swallow and pause, but he pushes up off the swing and heads toward her, and then they’re walking to the fort. Sheldon is quiet beside Penny as she leads him through the trees, hands stretched out in front of her as she navigates in the near dark. She stumbles over a root, but Sheldon catches her arm and pulls her upright before she falls. She walks farther in and smells juniper from the creek bed beyond, and the sweet, heady hayseed scent all around. The evening primrose is blooming, she can taste it on the wind, and she wants to drag Sheldon along by the hand and comb through all the land she owns to find one. Instead, she opens her eyes and finds his on her, quizzical in the way he narrows his brow and leans in just slightly toward her.

“Not much farther,” she says.

She finds the little hut just past the clearing, right where she knew it would be. The door sticks when she opens it, but she pushes her way inside. The room is smaller than she remembers and she looks around slowly, taking in every detail. She tries to match everything to a memory, but all she can think of is the sweltering heat of summer and the dusty feel of wood beneath her feet.

When she looks back to the door, Sheldon is still standing in the clearing, a wary look on his face. “Come on, Sheldon,” she says, “it’s not going to collapse on you.”

He takes a cautious step forward. “Its structural integrity is not my foremost concern.” He lifts his chin and tries to peer around her. “Is anything living in there?”

Penny rolls her eyes and pushes the door open wider in invitation. “It’s fine, I promise. Come on.”

He makes a face like he should know better, but eventually he sighs and moves toward her, ducking as he walks through the door and standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. She can’t help but grin at the odd angle of his neck and weird slope of his shoulders, and in the dark she can just make out the scolding look he gives her.

She drops onto the floor, leaning back against the wall, and Sheldon folds himself down beside her. Their hips and shoulders don’t quite touch, but she can still feel him beside her, solid and warm.

The air in the cabin is hot and musty and the only light comes through the open door, filtering in softly from the clearing. It’s barely light enough to make out Sheldon’s features next to her, but she feels the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes beside her. She leans over and runs her hand over the floorboards, looking for one certain spot: she finds it and runs her fingers around the small hole, and comes up with Tommy’s lighter, found right where he left it. Penny flicks it on and off and watches the shadows dance around them.

“You know, Catherine the Great tried to learn Russian so hard, she gave herself pneumonia.” Sheldon doesn’t answer her, or correct her. She pulls her thighs up against her chest and sets her chin on her knee. “You know how when you’re little, everything seems so much bigger than it really is? I used to think this fort was a mansion. The biggest tree house in Nebraska.” When she was little, this was a castle and a hospital and a prison, whatever their imaginations dreamed. Most often, it was sanctuary, a giant cathedral underneath the rising trees. Really, the room is really barely big enough to stand in, especially for Sheldon, and she’s not sure he could lay end to end without hitting his head on the wall. She remembers this place as a fortress, and really it’s not much more than a hovel.

“This place is so small. This farm, the house.” Her throat starts to constrict, but there aren’t any tears left. “And my parents. God, they’re both just so—” She digs her nails into the skin of her knees. “They’re so small.”

She wills herself not to cry, to concentrate instead on the steady motion of her breath in and out. She sits still for a moment and waits for Sheldon to speak, but he keeps quiet. He’s been doing that more and more these days, letting her ramble without interrupting, letting her work her problems out aloud. He probably read in an article online that communication is necessary in the grieving process and is trying to follow it to the letter.

She’s been rambling more lately about her childhood, about her past, and it comes to the surface again as she sits beside him, the sounds of the forest filling the silence between them. She can’t get the image of her father out of her head, the way he sat at dinner last night with his hand over her mother’s. She can hear Beth’s voice and Anne’s quiet sighs, and she finds herself saying, “Beth was always Dad’s favorite. She was the most like him.” Penny flicks the lighter on and off. “And Anne was the sweetest. And Tommy was the neediest, even though he’d never accept help. And I was just. Penny. I was just here. And I’m still here, and it’s like. He doesn’t even notice. It’s like he doesn’t even care.”

Penny watches a moth flutter in through the window, the spotty moonlight catching its wings. “I wish Tommy had been at dinner last night. He’d have stood up to Dad.”

“I’d like to point out that you broke your own rule. I didn’t bring Tommy up at all.”

“I know, Sheldon, you were very well behaved.” She stretches her legs out and crosses them at the ankles. “Let’s just sit here for awhile, okay?”

When Sheldon and Penny stand to go, he holds his hand out to help her up, and when she feels his palm against hers, his skin is rough and his hand is strong. She knows he’s changed since he got out here, both in appearance and in other, little ways. She never really takes the time to notice, let alone think deep, important thoughts about it, but Sheldon’s gotten softer since he’s been out here, less likely to snipe at her or correct her grammar. And she’d be lying to say that the way he talks to her mother, the way he sits with her and listens and they seem to genuinely get along, doesn’t hit her right in a soft spot she’s always had for him.

He starts to pull his hand away but Penny tightens her fingers and leans in toward him just slightly.

“Thank you,” she says. “For last night.” She doesn’t say anything more than that, doesn’t thank him for driving all the way into town without a valid driver’s license, which she knows probably nearly gave him hives. She doesn’t thank him for helping her out of the truck and into bed, which she doesn’t remember, exactly, but she’s pretty sure happened. She vaguely remembers someone tucking her covers up under her chin and brushing the hair off her face, and really there’s no one else that it could’ve been, but she doesn’t bring that up either.

Sheldon clears his throat and his voice is strange when he speaks. “You’re welcome,” he says. Penny looks down at her bare feet, at Sheldon’s fingers wrapped around hers, and flicks the lighter on and off again. She follows Sheldon out of the cabin, silent as they walk back. They make their way slowly through the forest, back out toward the house, and she can see the porch light on, a beacon set to lead them home. The whole time he keeps his hand in hers, warm and solid against her palm.

\--

There’s a strange feeling in the house now, like they’re all waiting, coiled and prepared to spring up. Penny spends more of her time outside than she used to. She feels guilty, leaving her mom’s care to Sheldon, but it’s been a week since her mom announced that she was going to forego treatment, and they haven’t really talked about it.

 

Penny’s still mad at her dad for not telling her first, and at both of her parents for not involving her in the decision. She moved out here to be of value to the both of them, and it should’ve earned her more responsibility than Beth and Anne. Or something. It all just kind of sucks.

After a week of tense, horrible silence, Sarah puts her foot down. Bob is in the barn and Sheldon has conspicuously made himself scarce, and Sarah brooks no resistance as she leads Penny into the living room and sits her on the couch.

“I know you think I made this decision without you because I don’t value your opinion, but you should know better than that,” Sarah says. It’s not the most graceful of beginnings, and Penny prickles at her mother’s tone. It’s too rough, too hard. It sounds strange from this woman who’s never been anything but soft.

Penny crosses her arms against her chest, defensive. “It sure seems that way.”

“Penny,” her mother starts, but Penny interrupts.

“I came home to take care of you. To help you. And I’m here every day, and you don’t even include me in a decision like this? What am I supposed to think?”

Sarah leans forward and grabs Penny’s hand. “You’d have asked me to keep going, wouldn’t you?” There’s a tremor in her voice, and Penny keeps still, keeps her eyes on the floor and answers, “Of course, I would’ve.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you no.”

Penny’s eyes are full of tears, and she feels her voice getting louder, her throat constricting. “How can you give up? How can you just stop?”

“The trial’s in Baltimore,” Sarah answers. “I don’t want to move to Baltimore. I want to be here, with my family.”

“But Mom, I—”

“No,” Sarah says, with the decided, unyielding tone Penny knows all too well. “I am your mother. It’s not for you to decide for me.” There’s a terrible kind of give in her voice, a soft crack that makes Penny’s eyes spill over. “I know you’d take care of me forever,” she says, tucking the hair behind Penny’s ear and bringing her lips to her forehead. “I know you’d stay and do for me. But I don’t want it, Penny. I don’t.”

Penny slides her arm around her mother’s thin frame and lets herself be rocked back and forth. It’s not the heaving, sobbing ordeal it was that first time in the street and the truck and the shower. By the time Bob and Sheldon come back from the pastures, Penny’s face is dry and her head is in Sarah’s lap. They make dinner together, Penny and Sheldon, neither talking much as they work.

The next few weeks carry with them this same sense of quiet, of everyone working very hard not to disturb the hush in their house. Sheldon starts disappearing into the fields for hours at a time, a notebook tucked under his arm and a faraway look in his eyes Penny hasn’t seen since he got to Nebraska. Penny asks him what he’s working on, but he answers with long strings of science that Penny doesn’t understand. She doesn’t mind his absence though. It leaves her more time with Sarah and she’s glad of it, glad to have the days back with her mother.

Beth comes by more, usually with the kids. They all crowd into the living room and sit and recollect and it’s usually awful, more depressing than Penny has the stomach for. When Anne comes, all she does is cry. Penny and Sheldon usually head to the barn when it gets especially dreary. She taught him how to groom the horses, how to saddle and lunge them, and she watches his face while he stands in the round pen, and the horses run around and around.

Bob spends more time inside as well, sitting with Sarah on the couch or in their bedroom. He starts to look haggard and Penny does her best to keep him well fed and well rested. Penny’s not sure how, but somehow, between the three of them, everything gets done. There aren’t enough hours in the day for all the work to get done and to spend so long with Sarah, and all they are all the time is tired.

Penny hasn’t quite forgiven her father for not telling her about her mother’s decision not to pursue the trial out east. She understands Sarah’s reasoning well enough, but there’s no forthcoming explanation from her father and she learned long ago to let sleeping dogs lie. Penny is wise enough and tired enough to know that there’s no usefulness in holding grudges at this point, and she’ll only regret it later. She’s come to see her mother for what she is: loving, to a fault, and devoted beyond measure. She knows her mother isn’t perfect, but she recognizes the pieces of her she inherited, and the ones she was grateful not to get. As for her father, well. There are more important things to think about right now.

Penny gets less and less sleep as time goes on. She was always up early for chores around the farm, but now she wakes just before sunrise, suddenly gasping awake and looking wildly around her room. She always wakes up feeling like she’s missing something.

One morning when she comes down from her room, she hears voices from the porch. It’s been a month since Sarah made her announcement and she’s been spending more and more time in bed, but Penny can hear her now, her voice just barely filtering in through the open back door. Penny’s about to head past her to the kitchen when she hears another voice: Sheldon. She’d been expecting her father, but it’s not his deep bass that comes through the door. Penny creeps up, her bare feet padding silently on the wood floor, and presses her ear to the screen.

“Beth was the same way,” her mother is saying. Penny can hear the dull creak of the porch swing moving back and forth. “She was always getting into more trouble than the rest of the girls combined. Not quite so much as Tommy, though.”

Penny instinctively sucks in a breath. She misses her brother, but she’s too used to avoiding his name, to quickly changing the subject and moving on. She’s about to open the door and interrupt when she hears Sheldon ask, “How are he and his girlfriend liking their new apartment?”

It stops Penny up short to hear Sheldon ask about her brother like he knows him, like he knows the details of Tommy’s life and past and history. She doesn’t usually think too hard about what he and her mother talked about in all their afternoons together, but she wonders now. What stories did her mother tell? What anecdotes and memories is he privy to? She didn’t even know her brother had a girlfriend.

“Missy and her latest victim are currently co-habitating in Dallas. I’ve been warned I am not to tell our mother, as intercourse before marriage is a one-way ticket to hell and Ma knows how to use a shotgun.” She hears her mother laugh, a light, breathy sound that makes her throat catch.

“Do you miss Texas?” Sarah asks.

Sheldon doesn’t answer for awhile, and the only sounds are the creak of the swing and the morning murmurs of the cows coming out to the pasture. She can’t see his face, can only just see the corner of a quilt dragging along the floor as the swing rocks back and forth, but she can imagine what he looks like: defensive, with his face twisted up, and a condescending look in his eye. She expects a glib answer, something like she gets whenever she asks about his childhood or family life, but when he finally speaks, his voice is softer than she’s expecting.

“With very few exceptions, I haven’t been back to Texas since my father died. It’s not—” He pauses and a bird way out in the wood starts to whistle. “It’s not a place with the happiest of memories. I’d rather avoid unnecessary conflict.”

“Conflict between who?” Her mother’s voice is soft in a way that Penny’s never is, and it’s probably this more than anything that makes Sheldon answer.

Penny hears him breathe out, long and labored, like it pains him. Maybe it does. She’s never heard him talk sentimentally about any of this, and for a second she feels bad for listening, for spying, for intruding like she is. Still, she doesn’t step away.

“My mother,” Sheldon says, “is a very religious woman. My siblings and I kept up appearances for her sake, but we were by no means devout. But we pretended. My brother told me it was the nice thing to do, but I just wanted her to stop harassing me. My father didn’t pretend. He didn’t try to appease her, or placate her.” Penny bites her lip and leans her shoulder against the door frame. “He wasn’t the type of man to do something to make others happy. Not even us.”

It all sounds too familiar to Penny, and hits too close to home. A man who doesn’t pull punches or soften his words. A man with no give at all. Penny feels like she understands Sheldon better than ever, and maybe for the very first time. She wants to run out onto the porch and wrap her arms around him, and kiss his jaw and smooth her hands over his back. With all they’ve been through, she’s pretty sure he’d let her.

“When did he pass?” Sarah asks.

“I was in Germany,” Sheldon answers. “I was studying advanced theoretical physics. I was 17.”

Penny listens to him talk for awhile about his father and his family. He doesn’t drone on, doesn’t actually say much at all, but it’s still a mouthful. It still makes her uncomfortable, thinking about her own relationship with her father, about her past and her family. About the ways things could change, should change before her mother’s not around to see it.

Sheldon’s quiet for a long while and it’s Sarah’s voice that cuts the silence. “Sheldon, why did you come here?”

“I was on sabbatical from the University,” he answers too quickly. Sarah knows as well as Penny that this is only part of the reason, and Penny can only imagine the look her mother’s giving Sheldon right now. She hears him clear his throat awkwardly and answer, “I guess you could say I was lost. And then Penny’s letters came and I bought a train ticket. You’ll find I’m not naturally impulsive, but I suppose that’s the truth.” He says it like it’s the first time he’s thought of it, like it’s the first time it ever entered his mind that things aren’t going exactly to plan. He clears his throat again. “I was lost.”

“And now? Why are you still here?” Penny’s never known her mother to be so forward, to push where people needed to be pushed. That’s something Penny inherited from her father, or from Beth maybe. But Sarah’s changed since she got sick, and especially since she gave up the treatment. It makes Penny happy and heartbroken in equal measure. She waits for Sheldon’s answer, her throat and hands tight, but instead she hears the heavy fall of her father’s boots down the stairs. She jumps away from the door and heads into the kitchen, busying her hands without knowing where they fall.

When her father comes in to the kitchen, she’s struggling with a coffee filter, unable to separate the thin paper from the pack. He stops in front of the refrigerator and pulls out bread and jelly. They don’t say anything until the sounds of brewing coffee fill the kitchen, and Penny waits with her mug between her clasped hands.

Sheldon and her mother are still out on the porch. Penny thinks about Sheldon and his father. She thinks about Tommy out there somewhere in an apartment she’s never seen with a girlfriend she’s never met. She opens her mouth to speak, but then the toaster dings and her father says, “I’ll see you out in the barn in half an hour. Don’t waste time. There’s a lot to do today.”

Penny doesn’t answer. She waits until the coffee’s brewed and then pours herself a cup, and then starts breakfast.

She spends all day outside with her father but she never says the things she wants to. They tend the cows and clean the stables, and go over the books and write the business checks. By the time she heads back inside, she’s barely got time to shower before dinner. She and Sheldon sit at the kitchen table. Bob takes his plate upstairs to eat with Sarah.

After they eat, Penny does the dishes. It’s part of her bargain with Sheldon; one cooks, one cleans. Usually Sheldon sits and reads, or scratches incessantly in the notebook he’s always carrying around now, and Penny listens to the radio while she washes up. She’s scrubbing a frying pan and bobbing her head to horrendously catchy pop music when she hears the sounds of music coming from the living room. It’s not just music; it’s Sheldon playing the piano. She’d caught him eyeing it once or twice, but when she’d asked him to play he’d declined. She dries her hands off on a towel and steps into the living room and sees him, back straight and hands moving gently over the keys.

If someone had told her three months ago that Sheldon would be the person she’d come to most depend on while her mother slipped quietly away, she’d have laughed. She’s not laughing now.

She crosses the room and stands behind him and watches him play, her eyes following the lines of his arms and swift movement of his fingers. The floor creaks beneath her feet and he pauses, starts to turn and look at her, but she says, “Keep playing,” and rests a hand on his shoulder.

He plays bright tunes and haunting melodies. His hands are strong on the hard, heavy chords and they fly too quickly over the cheery runs. Penny stays behind him, her hand on his shoulder. He sways a little as he plays and she feels the rhythm in his shoulders and her chest, and she fights the strangled feeling in her throat.

Eventually, his hands come to rest over the keys, a low chord still echoing around them. “I don’t know any more,” he says. The words sound like they stick in his throat.

“Tommy moved to a new apartment?” It’s not what she thought she was going to say and it seems odd for this to be what’s at the forefront of her mind, but Sheldon doesn’t seem to find it strange.

“He moved in with his girlfriend a month ago. Your mother sent flowers.”

Penny takes her hand from his shoulder and turns, sitting down on the bench. She’s seated opposite Sheldon but they face each other, and Penny keeps her head down and just feels him next to her. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know he had a girlfriend.” She picks at the hole in the knee of her jeans. “You know things about my family even I don’t know.”

Sheldon runs his finger up and down the key, then presses it slowly. The note sounds hollow. “Her name is Sam.”

Penny takes a big breath and lets it out slowly, and her thigh presses against Sheldon’s as they sit. It’s been like this for months, Sheldon’s weight a calm, steady force against her side. In the cab of the truck and in the fort out back. In the kitchen and at the table, their hands meeting over plates and dishes. She’s spent the entire summer with him beside her, just like this, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world to lean over and press her lips to his.

He doesn’t startle or pull away. He lets out a sudden breath and she feels it against her cheek, feels him lean into her and turn his head just slightly. Her hand comes up to rest against his jaw and when she pulls away, his eyes are still open.

They don’t say anything for a long minute. Penny pulls back and spins around, faces the piano and nudges Sheldon’s shoulder with her own.

“Play something else,” she says.

He does.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys come out for Sarah’s funeral. Penny and Sheldon drive to the airport to pick them up, and when she sees them all at the arrivals curb, she nearly runs to greet them. She wraps her arm around all of them; she imagines she can still smell California on their clothes and in their hair, but it’s probably just her imagination.

The boys come out for Sarah’s funeral. Penny and Sheldon drive to the airport to pick them up, and when she sees them all at the arrivals curb, she nearly runs to greet them. She wraps her arm around all of them; she imagines she can still smell California on their clothes and in their hair, but it’s probably just her imagination. When she hugs Raj, he leans over and whispers, “I’m so sorry” into her ear.

Her throat is rough when she asks, “Raj, you can talk to girls now? And I missed it?”

“You didn’t miss anything,” Howard answers. “He was drinking on the plane.”

The boys serve as a welcome distraction in the days before the funeral. They’re staying at a small motel in town, but they come to house for most of the day. The house is full of people, their neighbors and friends and family. Sally has been a fairly constant presence at Penny’s side, and between her and Sheldon, Penny hasn’t had many quiet moments.

All the kids were there in the end, Beth and Anne and Tommy and Penny. Penny had been the one to bring back their brother. She’d gotten the address from Sarah and driven downtown one Saturday, and sat on his stoop until he’d come home. It took more than a little convincing to get him to be in the same room with their father, but in the end, Penny had won out. There are only so many times a son can say no to his mother, and Penny had worked that for all it was worth.

When the time came, it was so much quieter than Penny was expecting. She sat at the foot of the bed with Beth and Anne. Tommy and Bob stood next to the head board. They didn’t talk to each other much, but when Tommy started to cry in earnest, Bob put a hand on the back of his son’s neck and whispered something in his ear. One minute her mom was there and the next, she was gone. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no swelling music or hysterical sobs. There was a shaky breath and then stillness, and then lots of tears and hugs.

The morning of the funeral, everyone packs into the house before they head to the church, and the kitchen is full of casseroles and cookies that their friends and neighbors have been dropping off for days. Beth and Anne and their families are in the living room and the house is suddenly so much louder than Penny is used to.

Tommy comes in with Sam right behind him. Things are still tense whenever he’s around, but Penny’s glad to have him back. She gives him a tight hug and sits beside him on the couch, Tommy on one side and Sheldon on the other. She listens with half an ear to their small talk—which mostly consists of Tommy making confused faces and Sheldon trying not to get frustrated—until it’s time to go.

Sheldon drives and doesn't complain, and Penny wishes she could find it amusing how comfortable he's gotten breaking the law. She keeps her hands folded in her lap and watches the town pass by, and she's fine, she really is, she's not crying much at all until they pass the fountain, the one where she threw all those wishes away. She makes this sound in the back of her throat, this terrible, raw sound, and Sheldon looks away from the road long enough to see the tears start to track down her face in earnest. He doesn't do much—there’s not much to be done—just covers her hands with one of his, and holds onto her all the way to the church.

The ceremony is as hard as Penny was expecting, and it seems like half the town is there. There are former students and fellow teachers, and people from high school Penny didn’t think she remembered. She tries to remember their names instead of listening to the preacher, because if she listens she’ll cry and it feels like she’s done enough of that for a lifetime. Sheldon keeps an arm along the pew at Penny’s back, and tangles a hand in her hair when she folds into him and really loses it, when she hears Tommy start to cry and sees him and Anne embracing. It’s all she can do to turn her head and bury her face against Sheldon’s neck.

Afterward they head back to the house, Penny and Sheldon in front, and Raj and Howard and Leonard smooshed into the back. No one makes a comment about Sheldon driving. He takes a detour back to the house so as not to drive past the courthouse, and Penny squeezes his hand in thanks, but doesn’t say a word.

They spend the rest of the afternoon at the house. People bring over more dishes, more platters and pies and casseroles. Beth and the kids take up their own corner in the living room, and Anne tucks herself quietly into the couch. Matt keeps a comforting arm around her, and it's the first time Penny's ever liked him, the way he rubs quiet circles onto her back and keeps leaning down to whisper in her ear. Tommy keeps pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace, and Sam just sits in the chair sullenly and watches him, her eyes worried and withdrawn. Penny hasn't talked to her much, hasn't really even met her yet, besides at the funeral home this morning, but she seems okay.

Dad is a ghost. He keeps disappearing up the stairs and coming back down with redder and redder eyes. Aunt Marge keeps trying to feed him, and Uncle Stan keeps trying to get him drunk, but he just gets more and more sullen. She sees him slip out eventually, just open the back door and walk outside, and for a second she thinks about following him, but then she goes over to sit by Beth instead. The house is louder than it's been in months, even with everyone trying to speak in hushed voices, and Penny's glad for the distractions. She watches cousin Barbara try to keep a hold of her two-year-old son, who constantly proves himself to be a terror, and she watches the Johnsons from down the road try and strike up a conversation with her great aunt Sylvia, who's deaf in one ear and senile in the other.

Eventually, she steps out to the back porch, a plate of food in one hand that she's been holding for the better part of twenty minutes and hasn't touched yet. The guys are already outside, sitting on the back steps or leaning against the rail. They stop talking when she comes out, but she can still hear Leonard's laughter ringing through the air and it makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

"Don't stop talking," she says, walking past them to sit on the porch swing. "Just. Don't stop talking." Sheldon comes over from the steps to sit down next to her, and she sets her plate on her lap and lets him rock them and just listens.

They all glance at her, and start out a little awkwardly, but eventually they settle into an easy rhythm. Leonard tells her and Sheldon about the couple that moved in across the hall, into her old apartment; they're older, in their 50s, and pretty cool, he says. The man's a psychiatrist and the woman's an artist, and she brings him food sometimes, vegan lasagnas and cookies and loaves of fresh bread. She asks him over to look at her sculptures or her landscapes. Her name's Antonia.

"She's just trying to get in your pants," Howard says, winking slyly at Leonard. "I know how you've been having a dry spell lately. It's sad when Sheldon's getting more than you are, friend."

There's another awkward pause, and Penny shifts against Sheldon a little uncomfortably. They guys haven't asked about what's going on between Sheldon and Penny yet. She knows they want to, but she's not even sure she'd know what to say. They haven't really talked about what they're doing, or where it's going, and it's by no means the most straightforward relationship Penny's ever been in. If it's a relationship at all, which she's not sure it is.

Here's how things have usually gone since that night at the piano: Mom had a bad night, and Penny took to the porch swing, or the barn, or the bed of the truck. She'd be frustrated, or upset, or sullen, and he would come to her, every time. It didn't always lead to anything. More often than not, they would just sit and talk, or stare out over the fields or up at the sky. He would still point out the constellations, the different patterns in the darkness. The nights that started like that, with the wide reach of his arm above her and the gentle, sure sound of his voice in her ears, are usually the ones that ended up with Penny's hand up under Sheldon's shirt, and his fingers tangling into her hair.

He's not the most romantic of partners, and he's awkward sometimes with his hands on her body, but she likes it. There's comfort in the feel of his chest against hers, and his lips at her throat, or her shoulder. He's still headstrong, but if there's one thing that's changed about Sheldon since he's been here, it's his growing capacity for patience, and his improved self-control for the flaws and faults of others. She's gentle when she guides his hands, and forgiving when he missteps, and more often than not he surprises her with his sheer determination. He leans them back against the truck bed and settles a hand on her stomach, and then dips down, further, and she buries her face in his neck and forgets about the world for awhile. And afterward, they still sit and talk and linger. More than anything else it's comforting, for both of them, which is really what Penny needs.

She wouldn't have the worlds to describe that though, if any of the guys asked her to. She doesn't think Sheldon would know what to say either, and when she looks over at him, he's as caught by Howard's remark as she is, and as determined to just move past it.

"Penny, I was talking to your brother earlier," Leonard says, and the moment goes by without any explanations given. "That's exciting news about his girlfriend."

Penny squints her eyes at him and shakes her head a little. "What news?"

Leonard opens and closes his mouth, and looks stricken for a second, eyes jumping from her to Sheldon to the guys and back. "Oh. I don't." He stops and scratches at the back of his neck. "What?"

"What news?" she repeats.

She sees Raj grimace and look away, and she's got her eyes on his face when Leonard says, "That his girlfriend's pregnant."

Penny sucks in a breath and feels Sheldon immediately draw his arm closer around her. Her jaw tightens and her hands ball into fists. She's not angry or mad or really all that surprised, but there's this hard knot behind her ribcage, and suddenly her eyes are filling with tears. She wonders if her mom knew.

Leonard takes a step toward her, hands raised apologetically in front of him. "I'm so sorry, Penny, I thought you knew. I thought it was good news. Is it not? Good news?" He looks helplessly at Sheldon, who just cuts him off with a hard glance.

Penny tries to order her thoughts, but all she gets is more flustered. "It's fine, Leonard. It's—" She swallows hard, looking out past the barn and over the field. "It's good news.”

Just past the barn she can see a lone figure standing next in the field, beans up to his shins. She pushes herself off the swing with no explanation to the boys, and she’s halfway across the yard before she turns back to see them all looking at her in confusion.

When she gets closer to the field, she realizes it’s Tommy standing in a wide field of soy. She doesn’t say anything when she comes up behind him. There are tall clouds on the horizon and the ground is hard beneath Penny’s feet. She walks until she’s shoulder to shoulder with her brother, and he looks down at her and then back to the sky.

“Storm’s coming in.” He’s got a bean pod in his hand, and he picks at it lazily.

Penny tucks her hair behind her ear. “Good, we could use it.” She turns to look at him, at his rumpled collar and disheveled hair, and says, “You look like shit.”

Tommy breathes out a laugh and gives her a sharp look. “Thanks, Pen. I’m not sure if you heard, but my mom just died.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it.” She knows he’d look like this even if things were going good. He’s always had a lean and hungry look to him, his cheeks hollow and his eyes dark and hooded. It’s not that he looks sick or weak—she’s seen him rough up guys twice his size—he just looks tired. Bone weary and exhausted. As much as he needs it, he’s never been one to ask for help, and she knows there’s little usefulness in pushing the subject, so she looks away and says, “Sam seems nice.”

Tommy flings the bean pod into the field and leans down to pick a new one. “Sam is nice.” He gives her a look, an older brother look she’s always resented and says, “You and that tall guy seem pretty close. Is he nice?”

“Not always.”

“Is he mean?”

Penny shakes her head. “No, he’s not mean.”

Tommy breathes in deep and exhales hard, like he’s satisfied for now. “Good. That’s good.”

They stand for awhile and watch the clouds creep in. The air cools down rapidly and Penny hugs her arms around herself and runs her hands over her shoulders. When Tommy notices, he turns back toward the house and motions for her to follow, but he only gets a few steps away when Penny asks, “Did Mom know Sam’s pregnant?”

A big gust of wind that wraps Tommy’s tie around his neck, and he pauses for awhile before he answers. “No,” he says, and his voice is throaty and soft. “I didn’t get a chance to tell her.”

Penny nods her head and looks past him toward the house. She can see the guys still on the porch and a few of their cousins in the drive. “Does Dad know?”

Tommy clears his throat and says, “Yeah, he knows.”

Penny clenches her jaw. The rain will be in before sunset, and already the wind has a bite to it. She hasn’t missed the unusual closeness between Tommy and their father the past few days, and if she weren’t so glad to see them at peace, she’d resent it. She tries to keep the edge out of her voice when she says, “You and Dad seem to be getting along.”

“Penny, don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

Tommy shakes his head. “Don’t tell me that. I know you two are fighting.”

Penny raises her eyebrows, indignant. “We’re not fighting.”

“Yeah,” Tommy answers, “you two have been fighting for over a decade.” He takes a few steps toward her and she has to crane her neck to meet his eyes. “You know I’m the last person who will jump to that man’s defense, but come on, Pen. Cut him some slack.”

There are years of unresolved tension in her voice when she lifts her chin defiantly and asks, “Why?”

“He lost Mom too, you know.” It might be a trick of the lighting or the fresh air that’s done him some good, but Tommy suddenly looks younger than he has in a long, long time. He doesn’t wait for an answer before turning and walking back to the house. Penny stands in the field for a few minutes trying to sort her thoughts before she follows him, and when she walks into the living room, a bean pod in her hand, he gives her a look with no give at all.

It takes a long time for the house to empty out. Beth and Anne stay to help clean up, and Tommy and Sam sit out on the porch with her dad for a long time after everyone else goes. By the time she changes and washes her face, she’s not tired enough to sleep. She sits in the living room awhile but it’s too full of memories. The chair where her mother always sat. The book they were reading on the mantle. Sarah’s last knitting project sticking out from underneath the coffee table. It’s a weight on Penny’s chest and behind her eyes, and she pushes off the couch and creeps quietly upstairs. She steps over the stair that always squeaks and keeps her feet light as she walks down the hallway.

When she gets to Beth’s room, she pushes the door open quietly and makes her way over to the bed. She knows the hazards of waking Sheldon and she’s prepared for the worst, but when she leans down and lays a hand on his shoulder, he jerks awake silently and looks at her with wide, frightened eyes. He doesn’t say anything when she sits on the edge of the bed, just pulls the covers back and lets her in. He makes room for the both of them. He doesn’t open his arms and pull her to his chest, and he doesn’t slide his hand suggestively over her hip.

Sheldon sleeps on his back, with Penny beside him on her side, curled up with her head against his shoulder. She sleeps soundly for the first time in weeks.

The boys stay out for a few days, but then it’s time for them to head back to Pasadena. Sheldon and Penny drive them to the airport, and on the way home, all Penny does is wonder when Sheldon will be leaving. Why he’s stayed so long. He still disappears into the fields sometimes, still comes back with his notebook gripped tightly in his hands, and she’s sure it’s just a matter of time before he decides to go back to California.

Tommy starts coming around more. Come September he helps with the harvest and Penny can’t help but be amazed by the change in him. He looks study for the first time in years, like it would take more than a swift wind to knock him off his feet. And he and Dad aren’t fighting for once, which Penny finds truly amazing.

Sam comes around sometimes, her belly growing with every visit. She’s a teacher, Penny discovers, and a part-time waitress to help cover the bills. She keeps Penny company usually, when the boys and Dad are in the field. It keeps Penny’s mind off things for the most part, but she still finds herself with a quiet moment alone in the living room, reminders of her mother everywhere. She hurts for awhile, a steady kind of grief that stings her eyes and tightens her jaw, but eventually it starts to even out. Not disappear, but ease. She sits in her mother’s place on the couch and recollects and when her eyes fill with tears, they’re not tears of grief.

She starts to notice a change in Sheldon, a restless energy about him. He’s still softer in the places she’s come to know him best, but there’s a sense that things are changing and even if she wanted, Penny couldn’t stop them. She knows it’s only a matter of time before he decides to leave, and despite herself, she knows how sad she’ll be to see him go.

The harvest is finished and winter planting not yet begun when Penny knows it’s time. Sheldon comes out of the field, and Penny can see the hayseed clinging to the leg of his pants. Behind him, the sun is setting above the trees, streaks of orange and pink along the sky. The days are starting to get shorter; it's only 7:00, and already the sun is almost down.

She leans back against the barn door and watches Sheldon approach. There's a difference in his gait, an easier, loping movement of his legs as he walks. He's still tight and controlled for the most part, but something's given way and relaxed, and she keeps her eyes on the swing of his shoulders as he walks.

He stops just in front of her, his notebook held tight in his hands. He clears his throat to speak and then pauses, looks her over, and crinkles his eyes and says, "Penny, it's time to go home."

It's what she's been waiting for him to say for the past month, ever since Mom died and the boys went back to California. It's what she's been waiting to hear every night when she curls against him in Beth’s bed, with her leg slung over his hips and his fingers wrapping softly around her knee. She clears her throat and looks past him, out over the field and into the sunset. She bites her lip and smiles at him, slow and a little bit sad.

When she pushes herself off the door, she heads past him toward the driveway, fishing the truck keys from her pocket as she walks. "Come on," she says over her shoulder, and she hears the crunch of gravel behind her as Sheldon starts to follow. She clambers into the cab of the truck, and when Sheldon slides in beside her, she starts the engine and pulls out of the driveway. She rolls the window down and drives, and Sheldon knows better than to ask where she’s taking him. There have been too many mystery trips around town for this to be anything out of the ordinary at this point, and she glances over now and again to see him looking out over the fields that pass alongside them, cornstalks clipped and cut close to the ground.

They drive for only a few minutes before Penny steers the truck down a narrow lane, tree branches scraping the sides of the cab as they pass. The way is overgrown, but Penny remembers it well enough, and then the lane opens up into a clearing, a barely discernible hill amidst all that flat prairie land. She parks the truck under a big tree, and shuts off the engine and sits. She turns to look at him after a few minutes of silence, and says, "You're going home." It's not a question, or an accusation, just a flat statement of fact. She sounds resigned. She is resigned.

He fidgets a little awkwardly beside her and says, "It's time to go back to California. I've worked out several of the kinks in my research, and I believe the new hypotheses I've devised during my time here will be of interest to many of my peers." There's a coyote howling somewhere past the clearing, and his cry is a sharp sound against the quiet. "I need to go back."

Penny lowers her head, and her hair is a curtain around her face. "Okay."

"Penny, I—" For the first time, Sheldon falters, and his voice is more uncertain when he speaks. "I want you to come back too."

It's not something Penny let herself prepare for, that Sheldon would want her to come with him. She looks up and meets his eyes, and they're wide and warm and cautious. She opens her mouth to speak, but he cuts her off. "Penny, we need to go home."

She looks at him then, the curl of his hair against his temples and the faint lines around his eyes. She slides over toward him, and hitches a leg over his lap. His hands come up to rest against her hips, and she leans her forehead to his and says softly, "I can't."

She feels him swallow, the flutter of his muscle underneath her hand as she runs her palm up his chest and along his throat. Her fingertips skim his jaw and his Adam's apple bobs against her thumb. His breath is hot against her cheek and his voice is just a whisper when he says, “Penny, it’s time to go home.”

Penny closes her eyes and smiles into his jaw, then presses her lips to the hollow of his cheek. She pulls back and covers the spot with her palm, and when Sheldon leans into her hand just slightly, it’s all she can do not to bury her face against his neck and weep. Instead, she traces the line of his jaw with her fingertips, and uses the other hand to hold herself steady against the solidness of his chest. The sound of insects sneaks into the cab, a heavy rhythm that presses through the windows and against her ears. _Maybe this is home_ , Penny thinks. _Maybe California is just a dream, or a lie, or a fantasy._

Sheldon digs his fingers a little more soundly into her hips, and he pulls her toward him, forcing her eyes to meet his. “Penny,” he says, voice a little strangled, “it’s time to go home.”

Penny doesn’t answer, just slides her hands up to cup his face and leans down to press her mouth to his. His lips are warm beneath her own, and he slides his hands around her waist and up, flat against her back and pushing at the ends of her hair. They stay and watch the fireflies dancing in the field, and before the end of the week, Sheldon is gone.

\--

With just Penny and her father left, the house is too quiet. They still spend their days on chores and farm work, but Penny visits town more, going into the city to see Tommy and Sam or hanging out with Sally. She likes to think she’s not avoiding her father but if the last few months have taught her anything, it’s the futility of trying to buy more time.

She comes home from a shift at the bar one night and from the driveway she sees a light through the window. There’s still a lamp on in the living room and when she walks in the door, she’s surprised to see her father still up, sitting quietly in her mother’s chair.

“I thought you’d be asleep.” She’s got her shoes in her hand and her purse over her shoulder, and she looks questioningly at her father when she realizes he’s reading. Not the newspaper or the mystery novels he seems to favor, but the autobiography Penny and her mother never finished. Penny had read it all after Sheldon left, but hadn’t had the heart to return it to the library.

“Alice Paul was a Quaker,” Penny says, moving to sit in the chair across from her father.

He lays the book in his lap and leans back in his chair. “I read that,” he says, and then the room is quiet again. It feels like the start of every bad conversation Penny had in high school, that usually ended in Penny’s week-long grounding. She digs her toes into the carpet and looks at the figurines on the mantle when her father asks, “When are you heading back to California?”

Penny draws herself upright and narrows her eyes. “I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d stick around awhile, help you get settled.” She pushes herself up roughly from her chair and makes for the stairs, saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”

“Penelope, get back here.” It’s a phrase Penny’s heard a thousand times, and it’s still got the power to stop her in her tracks. She walks slowly back into the living room and levels her father with a fierce glare. “You know that’s not what I meant—” he starts, but Penny interrupts.

“That’s always what you mean.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.” Her hand grips the back of the chair so hard her knuckles are white. “You didn’t want me to go to California in the first place, why do you want me to go back now?”

“No, I didn’t want you to go to California,” he says. He leans forward in his chair, voice getting louder and louder. “I didn’t want you following that boy a thousand miles away with no plan. You were always one step behind trouble, your whole life.”

“I thought that was Tommy,” Penny bites back, “and you seem to have patched things up with him.”

Her father runs his hand over his face, the wrinkled and weathered brow. His voice is quieter when he says, “You never made it easy.”

Penny shifts from foot to foot. “Well, I’m sorry for that, then.”

“If you want you to go to California, go to California,” he says, standing up from his chair. “But I want you to go because _you_ want to go. I don’t want you to run away to Sheldon like you ran off with Todd, and I don’t want you to go because you think you’re not welcome here.” He walks until he’s standing just next to her, and Penny works to meet his eyes. “Did you ever stop to think that I didn’t want you to go to California because I wanted you here?” She holds his eyes as long as she can, and when she looks down at her hands he walks past her, up the stairs and to his room.

There’s a large part of Penny that knows her father’s not wrong. She’s self-aware enough to recognize her limits and her weaknesses when she’s forced to take a hard look at herself, and for the first time, she tries to imagine what her father’s seen over the past few years. It’s a thought that keeps her up well into the night.

\--

She spends the next week trying to decide what to do. She goes back and forth in her mind and tries to suss out her true motivations, to figure out what it is she really wants. She tries to imagine what her mother would say if she were here.

“I’d go to California and lay on the beach and never leave,” Sally says.

“I’d find a hundred new ways to get in trouble,” Tommy answers.

They’re sitting on the back porch passing a bottle of cheap wine between them. Penny’s shift at the bar had ended early and Tommy had still been at the house when she and Sally got back. One thing had lead to another, stories of high school and hometown legends keeping them occupied for hours, and now they’re dissecting the details of Penny’s future.

“Here’s what it comes down to, kid,” Tommy says, leaning over and getting in her face, just like he always used to when they were young. “What do you want to do?”

An owl hoots from somewhere past the barn. There are 400 acres of her family’s land around her, and she smiles to herself and then pushes off the swing. She darts inside and grabs the truck keys off the kitchen counter and then heads back to the porch. “You two. Come on.” She walks out to the drive and hears them following behind.

She tried to get Sheldon to do this thing with her, this thing Tommy used to do with her and her friends, this stupid, dangerous thing. He’d said no, of course, but when she looks at Tommy and Sally from the cab of the truck, they give her the wicked grins she loves best and climb in beside her without a word.

They drive the truck out past the west-most field, to the flattest, straightest stretch of dirt road on the property, and Penny gets out and climbs over the tailgate and into the bed of the truck. The night is dark and cool, summer fading out into the chill of fall, but the sky is clear. She can see all the stars Sheldon taught her, Orion, Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, seven sisters in the sky. She leans her head back and takes in all of it, the wide stretch of a Nebraska night sky pulling out in every direction.

“You ready?” Sally yells out from the cab. Penny grabs onto of the edge of the rear window and holds on tight. She braces her feet and sets her jaw, and the night is clear and bright and she’s alive and she could be happy.

“Go!” Penny yells, and the truck leaps forward and she tightens up instinctively, memories flooding through her and the wind cutting into her clothes. She’s hip-level with the top of the cab and Tommy’s flying down the lane and Sally’s cranking something that thuds in Penny’s already beating chest. Penny spreads her free arm out, like she’s flying, and the wind slides through her fingers, peeling her hair away from her neck.

She’s blissful. She’s ecstatic. There are tears leaking from the corners of her eyes and the wind pushes them off her face, and the night is bright and clear and when the truck finally stops, she’s still laughing.

\--

The drive from Omaha to Pasadena isn’t half as long as she remembers, and she makes it all the way without breaking down once. Before she knows it she’s pulling onto the 210 and seeing street signs with names she recognizes. There’s a suitcase in the trunk and a cardboard box in the backseat filled with only the things she knew she couldn’t do without: pictures of her family, and a quilt her mother knit, and a book with an old photo to mark the page. She drives into town on a Tuesday afternoon and the first place she heads isn’t the apartment complex, it’s the University. She parks her car at a meter a block away from the guys’ building and takes off. There are students everywhere, and the air smells like green grass and blooming trees, and sand and sky and water. Penny can feel the sun on her face, and she turns her face up without even thinking.

She’s across the street from the Physics building when she sees them, Sheldon and Leonard and Raj and Howard. Sheldon’s leading the way, talking with his hands while the guys make facing behind him, and it’s so devastatingly normal and perfect that Penny freezes in her tracks. She watches them as they cross the street toward her, and her heart starts to pound. It’s like the wind in her hair in the back of the truck, only the ground beneath her feet isn’t moving. There’s a tree above her head that’s filled with white flowers, and the sky is a perfect, California shade of blue.

Sheldon suddenly looks right at her and every movement in his body stops. She sees the guys look at him in confusion, and then follow his eyes to her, and then she doesn’t see anything at all but the look on Sheldon’s face as he steps toward her.

Penny’s done waiting. She’s done wandering. She’s ready to plow forward full tilt, and with her whole life in front of her, she smiles. She runs.


End file.
